After working for the past year and a half through his bicoastal house, Message, director Robert Black has joined Hollywood-based Orbit Productions, the commercial production shop of parent company Orbit (previously known as Orbit Entertainment Group).
Accompanying Black to Orbit Productions is executive producer Lynne Pateman, his partner from now defunct Message, which was launched last year as part of the Michael Romersa-owned Stoney Road family of companies (SHOOT, 6/18/99, p. 1).
Pateman has taken on executive producer duties for all of Orbit Productions’ directors—a function previously served by company president Lee Nelson. Already, "she’s really taken a lead position here," Nelson reported. "She’s taken a lot of pressure off of me because I’m really putting a lot of time now into the interactive space."
Over the past few months, by way of a trial run, Black and Pateman produced six jobs for clients through Orbit Productions. Among them is a three-spot package for State Farm insurance via DDB Chicago that is part of an ongoing campaign promoting State Farm’s reliability in the event of disasters. "We really enjoyed working together tremendously," stated Nelson, who added that Black’s subsequent signing culminated a five-month courtship of the director.
Nelson said that Orbit Productions was drawn to Black based upon his top-notch reel and his big-picture perspective of the advertising business. "He understands it from an agency side because he has an agency background," Nelson explained. "You have to bring more to the table now than just being able to shoot great-looking film—that’s got to be taken for granted. Robert is not a technician; he’s a storyteller. He combines storytelling with an understanding of strategy, and [how to] communicate the message of a product through film and a story. He shoots film that touches people, and I think that’s something that all of us here responded to."
While commercials remain his main area of focus, Black is also interested in convergent media. Orbit’s new media resources appealed to the director. The fact that Orbit already has an interactive division—through a recently struck deal with multimedia specialist Jeremy White to launch Seattle-based interactive media shop endtheory (SHOOT, 9/22, p. 7)—helped persuade Black that Orbit would be a good match for him.
"A few people had approached me in the last year about doing something [in convergent media]," said Black. "I didn’t really know much about Orbit at all. And as I moved into it, I found they had a lot of things in place waiting for someone to step in."
Black and Orbit are now in the process of developing BlackLabCreative.com. It is envisioned as an idea lab that will help agencies develop convergent media content, primarily longform, which could then conceivably be executed by endtheory. "The idea," Black noted, "is to develop potential content that would cut across borders—something that would work in TV, would work on the Internet, et cetera. So it’s really, hopefully, going to be a place to conceptualize and build ideas."
Black believes that Orbit has the partnerships to facilitate that goal. Aside from endtheory, working relationships include a strategic alliance that Orbit’s feature division, Orbit Pictures, entered into earlier this year with Culver City, Calif.-based feature studio Phoenix Pictures, which is headed by Mike Medavoy (SHOOT, 1/21, p.1).
Per that deal, Orbit Pictures will produce five movies for Phoenix over a three-year period. Orbit Pictures also has a first-look deal with Phoenix, which holds a minority stake in Orbit. "I think the connection with Phoenix gives us access to longform writers and allows us to pull in expertise from other areas," observed Black.
Additionally, the Phoenix tie may serve to help Black become more active in longform. The director said he has written one feature script and owns the rights to another. Nelson related that Orbit is currently pitching a couple of projects to Phoenix, with Black attached to direct.
Agency seeds
Black began his career as an agency creative and copywriter at a couple of San Francisco-based agencies, most notably Foote, Cone & Belding (now FCB), San Francisco, where he had been a creative director for nearly 10 years. In late 1988, he left FCB to pursue a directing career full-time, and joined Travisano DiGiacomo Black Films (now Travisano DiGiacomo Films, New York). In ’91, he moved to bicoastal G.M.S. Productions (now Villains) before shifting over to bicoastal Headquarters in ’95.
Black was also nominated for the Directors Guild of America Award for commercial direction in ’97. The entries that earned him the nomination were "Firefighter" for Rite Aid Drugstores via Marc Advertising, Pittsburgh; "Antonio" for Baked Lay’s potato chips via BBDO New York, and "Rancher" for Southwestern Bell via DMB&B (now D’Arcy), St. Louis.
Black joins an Orbit Productions directorial roster also consisting of Danny Weisberg, Agust Baldursson, Carroll Ballard, Wim Wenders and Roger Spottiswoode. Orbit is repped on the West Coast by Andrew Halpern, on the East Coast by Lew & Co., and in the Midwest by Robin Pickett and Associates.
